Due to the advance of digital media technology and decreasing price of computer storage, users increasingly store digital media collections on their main personal computers (PC). Digital media includes music, pictures, videos and the like. However, not all consumption or use of digital media occurs on a user's main PC. Increasingly users are transferring all or some of their collection to portable computing devices such as personal media players (e.g. portable music players), personal digital assistants (PDA), and laptop computers. Transferring allows the user to enjoy the media without being tied to the user's main PC.
With larger collections of digital media and the advent of high capacity storage on portable computing devices, filling portable computing devices with a meaningful subset of a user's digital media collection can be a laborious task. This is especially the case when the user's digital media collection on the main PC is larger than the storage available on the portable computing device.
Conventionally, the user is left to manually manage this problem. If the collection of digital media on a source device (e.g., main personal computer) exceeds the storage capacity of a target device (e.g., a portable computing device), the user manually selects which items to include (and/or exclude) in a transfer to the target device.
Furthermore, in conventional approaches, the user may have to remove digital media from an otherwise full memory of the target device when the user wishes to replace such digital media with new digital media from the collection resident at the source device.